America for Sale!

When the U.S. Supreme Court declared corporations human beings, they also made it possible for anybody with the cash to spend as much of it as they could afford to buy politicians. No questions asked. And in perfect secrecy, except of course the candidates would know who they'd sold their souls to. But politicians at the federal level never worry about that. They've already hocked their souls just to get to where they are.

Sometimes, however, we get a glimpse of who's paying what to whom. Robert Reich, the former Clinton White House official, unveiled some of the big buyers earlier this week. Take a look to see who's keeping company with whom.

T-Party Hypocracy:

T-Party members are found of demanding less government in everyone's life, but in Chisago County, Minnesota, whose voters gave Rick Santorum 57 percent of the vote, every man in the recent primary, every man, woman and child received $6,583 in some form of federal benefit in 2009.

While in 1979, 54 percent of benefits went to the bottom fifth, in 2007 only 36 percent reached that group.

As New York Times  reporters Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff point out,

In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.

To read more, see the Times article here.

World's Richest Man:

When I was young, GM was worth more than the gross domestic product of most of the countries of the world, ranking fourth after the U.S., Britain, and the U.S.S.R. Both GM and the U.S.S.R. have fallen on hard times since those heady days in the sixties when muscle cars and muscular missiles seemed to rule the future.

Now days, a company named after a pioneer who carried seeds in his pockets and scattered them around Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois knocks a lot of countries out of the park in comparison to dollar value. (Apple is worth more than Sweden's gross national product.)

And who would have seen this coming:  A Mexican named Carlos Slim is the world's richest man, possessing something more than $63 billion. No, rednecks, he's not a drug lord or a coyote. Carlos Slim Helu made most of his money off the cell phone business. There's that pocket connection again.

Heal Thyself:

In the latest edition of Poetry, Dunya Mikhail states,

Doctors know a lot about disease and witness a lot of problems, all they do is give you a small piece of paper with a prescription. Poets do the same. But doctors can heal you. Poets can only give you x-rays so that you see your wound.

(Poetry, February 2012, 450)

I'm not so sure doctors heal anyone. Perhaps they only help create an environment in which you heal yourself. Maybe that's what poets do too. Maybe that's the function of art. And why medicine is an art.

Penn State University posts a revealing view of how race influences our perceptions of leadership abilities:

Media portrayal of race in sports reveals biases in corporate world

More Dirty (Congressional) Linen:

In another Washington Post exclusive, we learn about sixteen lawmakers who have earmarked "tax dollars to companies, colleges and community groups where their relatives work as salaried employees, lobbysts or board members."

Just because it's not illegal doesn't make it right.

Read the story here.

Dying to learn more about "earmarks," you know, the bridges to nowhere?

The Washington Post has posted an exclusive this evening on a detailed investigation of "earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or near the lawmakers' own property."

Read this exclusive story here.

Quote of the Day:

"If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it." — Kazim Ali (Poetry, Feb. 2012, 436.)

Clearly, this is an idea we should discuss at some length.

You Might Be Suffering, but Exxon Is Doing Just Fine:

Just because the economy is in the pits for most us, don't assume that's true for the oil companies. The big boys of big oil have figured out to earn record profits no matter what's happening with the rest of the world.

You probably turned your thermostat down this winter, wear an extra sweater around the house, drive fewer miles. Maybe you even traded in that old pick up for a little gas saver car.

But big oil just jacks its prices up. Exxon reported a greater profit this year than last: $9.4 Billion. Maybe it's just the economy coming back. For some people. (See The New York Times story.)